At the turning of one year to the next, before we welcome the coming change of season, we celebrate Solaria. Unlike the garish tourism and spectacle of the lunar festival Terlunia, Solaria is an intimate time for communities to gather and share together. Friends and family alike congregate with feasts and celebration, rejoicing in what each member of the community has accomplished and looking forward to what they’ll do in the year to come.

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Jair Welburne returned to the Institute in the middle of the night, to find there was quite a commotion going on. Despite the late hour, people were rushing about and torches were lit in place of the normal lights.

The first thing that happened when he dropped to the middle of the hubbub was Raina screamed "You're alive!" and jumped on him with a hug tighter than he'd imagined her little arms could manage.

The second thing was Larenok blustering forward with a scowl and some loud words about irresponsibility and demanding to know where he'd been. The headmaster's face was always unhappy by default, but when he was upset it could get significantly more so. Dramatic to the point of comical, in Jair's opinion.

Jair looked down at Raina clinging to him, questioningly.

She shook her head slightly, flicking a brief frown in Larenok's direction.

Interesting. So she hadn't told anyone what they were doing?

"We need to get away somewhere so we can talk," he murmured to her. "Briefly, what's going on here?"

"I saw a dragon and raised the alarm. No one was taking it seriously, so..." she bit at her lip briefly, looking half ashamed and mildly smug. "I connected your wards. When the power went down, everyone noticed. When I pointed out the glowing dragon..." she gestured around at the group. "Combination of panicking students and unhappy teachers. Sometimes it seems it's going to break up, but then some new bunch comes out to join the havoc. I'm surprised they haven't started sending people home yet."

"Welburne!" Larenok shouted, no longer content with scowling and ranting. "Serin, stand aside."

Raina turned to look up at him defiantly, keeping her arm around Jair. "As designated companion on my upcoming Reforging Quest, he is no longer under your jurisdiction."

Larenok's face reddened. "He and I have business that isn't any of yours."

"And he and I have business that isn't any of yours," Raina snapped back without hesitation. "So I'd appreciate it if you stop wasting our time and say what you have to say. We have a lot to prepare."

Jair put his own arm around her shoulders, heart full of joyful relief. He'd almost expected something to have gone wrong even without Ryenzo's relentless attack; to see Raina alive and well was more than he'd quite dared to imagine.

Yet here she was.

The day of her death was over, and she was still alive. And as feisty as ever.

Reforging Quest. He'd suggested it as a cover for getting Maelstrom looked at, but it was still a perfectly good plan. Without the urgency of figuring out what was wrong with his sword, they could truly devote themselves to nothing but attuning Raina to her own soulsword and upgrading her class. They could go off and have adventures together, all across the world, just like they'd always wanted.

The atmosphere of worry, anger, fear, and overall unhappiness in the crowd around them was irrelevant. Larenok's retort was coming, but for this one brief moment Jair was content. Nothing could stand in their way any longer.

"Where have you been? Why did you ignore the alarms? What do you know about this?"

"I didn't hear any alarms," Jair answered honestly.

"I know you had something to do with this. You've been up to something all week. I know it."

"Yes, I've been trying to warn everyone about the dragon." Or... had he? He couldn't remember what had actually happened in this version of the timeline. Perhaps not, given Larenok's look of absolute blank confusion. "I didn't cause the problem, but I suppose it's easier to blame the one trying to fix it than deal with the actual responsible parties."

"Don't think I won't tell the Provisional about this," Larenok growled. "I don't know who you think you are, but you're no student of mine."

"You're right, I’m not your student. I'm leaving with Miss Serin as escort to her Reforging Quest, as I believe she just told you. And we have plans to make." Jair turned to go, Raina still at his side.

“I knew you were trouble from the day you crawled in here, lowborn.” Larenok couldn’t let him walk away without pressing the issue. "All this time you’ve been a drain on my Institute’s resources, just so you could cozy up to some rich girl and throw away what little potential you had?”

“I believe my father would object to your characterization of me as ‘some rich girl’, Headmaster,” Raina interposed, her voice taking on a strident declarative note. “I believe the late night has been having a deleterious effect on your emotional stability. Everyone is tense right now, so we should disperse and get some rest, and we can address the new situation in the morning. Agreed?”

“Tokens, then.” Larenok held out his hand. “If you think you can sneak off without answering for what you’ve done—”

Jair handed his over without a word. Astralla City was less than an hour away by sandshark, and barely longer than that by bladewalk. He didn’t need authorization for the academy transit to get anywhere he needed to be.

Raina frowned, looking as though she’d argue, but followed Jair’s example rather than continue arguing. The moment they were out of the circle of firelight from the odd midnight assemblage, she slumped against him in exhausted relief.

“You good?”

“No. I’m barely holding it together. Let’s get home, then we can try to sort through it.”

Jair chuckled. “Or follow your own suggestion and sleep. We can talk in the morning.”

“Did you really kill the dragon?”

“Well… not exactly. I don’t quite know what I did to her. But she’s not actively pursuing you at the moment, and we have a few days to decide what to do about her before she’ll press the issue.”

Raina pressed a hand to her forehead, then yawned expansively. “Yeah. Maybe we should sort it out in the morning.”

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Jair slept uneasily. Despite having come closer to reaching his ideal outcome than ever before, his mind kept replaying failure scenarios. Each time he woke to the darkness of an unlit campus and distant flickers of firelight, he had to cross to Raina’s door and listen for her breathing before he could convince himself that today hadn’t been the dream.

He several times summoned Maelstrom to stare at its dark core, its new and unfamiliar yet intimately known form. It no longer glowed except when he wanted it to, its edge gleaming silver at a thought or dimming completely on a whim.

He didn’t know what to think. For all intents and purposes, Maelstrom had become his soulspell. Except it remained an item. And it had three abilities, none of which as far as he could tell used mana any longer.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Darkflame, he knew. Kind of. It burned things, and brought them back changed. He still needed to test how much changed and what its limitations were. Right now it was an uncertain power, which wasn’t ideal when he might need to depend on it in a fight.

Integration, probably had something to do with how it’d become an ‘Integrated’ soulsword. He’d never heard of a tier beyond ascended, but if any weapon were going to break the boundaries of reality itself, it’d be Maelstrom. Complete unknown for now, but given the hunger he felt within Maelstrom’s soul, he had the feeling he’d find out soon enough.

Temporal Reversion, he would have to test. Much later. His one timefall so far had clearly demonstrated that his soulspell had been irrevocably altered, but he was in a tenuous success timeline and he’d not risk it becoming a failure.

Jair slept for another hour, woke from a dream of failure to a sense of dull resignation, verified that Raina was still alive, and gave up on trying to sleep.

For a few minutes he paced silently, then he sat in the livingroom on the floor facing her door so he’d be the first to know when she was ready to come out.

Closing his eyes, he set about ordering his thoughts and priorities.

Largest problem would be Ryenzo, currently asleep out in the desert. She still wanted Raina dead. By all appearances, she wanted Jair dead too, but so far hadn’t attempted the former and couldn’t do the latter post-Darkflame.

Even if they were in a tentative truce at the moment, a barely-civil angry dragon was not something that could be simply ignored. He needed a plan.

The thought of fleeing flickered through his mind. If they waited until the last moment for a lunar passage, they might be able to slip through before Ryenzo could hijack the connection. Even a dragon couldn’t force the moon to turn into alignment.

She’d still come after them at the next available opportunity, but by then Jair and Raina could be somewhere far better equipped than Veor. Frontline coastal warriors were expensive, not unattainable. Killing dragons was very difficult, but they’d have the advantage of a month to prepare and set up everything they needed to ambush Ryenzo and take her down properly.

It was tempting. But as much as Jair wanted to pretend that would be good enough, this was an invaluable opportunity. A Ryenzo who could speak coherently and wasn’t mad with hatred was a chance to get answers like never before.

For now, he would try reason. If it came to fighting, he’d solve that problem when it arose.

With Ryenzo postponed until the lunar passage in a week, that still left the question of what to do about the current uproar.

It’d been a long time since Jair stuck around for the fallout of things at the academy, and things were decidedly different this time as well. Instead of a wrecked building and dead student at minimum, they had a sleeping dragon well away from them being a large menacing presence without any active clarity on what or why.

Jair could understand draconic, but not many other people in Veor bothered to learn it. It was culturally alien to the point that no one even had a lizardbox on hand in the entire country. Which had caused him extensive frustration in past loops when he was trying to negotiate with Ryenzo. Back then, however, it didn’t matter how loudly he bellowed for her to stop, she simply ignored him and went on with eating Raina.

So without any ability to ascertain why there was a poison dragon matriarch sleeping outside their academy, the place would be in chaos. Jair was the closest thing to a translator that could be found on the continent and he wasn’t planning to make that known.

He was still mulling over the possibilities when the door opened and Raina emerged, still in her fluffy nightrobe, her hair a bit poofier than normal. She looked down at him on the floor, yawned, looked back into her room, then grabbed a pillow from the sofa and flopped down across from him.

“It’s morning.”

“True.”

She looked at Maelstrom. She looked at Jair’s face. She looked at the pile of blue ceramic-steel Veshin armor that had cost more than she’d ever spent in her life combined. “I have no idea where to start.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Take your time.”

Raina took a deep breath. Then she held out her hand and a sword made of absence appeared in it. “What is this, and how did I do it?”

Jair blinked. Of all the questions he expected her to lead with, this was not on the list. He stood. “May I?”

She handed the sword to him, and it ceased to exist. For a moment its outline lingered, wavering and strange, as though light itself were hesitant to encroach on its former domain.

“Huh.”

They both stared at her hand. She manifested the sword again, and set it on the floor. The moment her hand released it, it vanished.

“Huh.”

“What exactly did you do?” Jair asked, frowning. “This isn’t an effect I’ve seen before.”

“I tried to feed my soul to my sword like you said, but there was nothing there, so I put the sword inside it instead, and now… I’m not sure what happened.”

Jair chuckled and rubbed the back of his head. “Ah, yes, we should probably talk about it before you try something that drastic again. See, when I fed my soul into Maelstrom, it did kill me. So definitely not something you should be attempting.”

“So you’re a vampire now? That explains a lot.”

Jair snorted. “Hardly.” He held out Maelstrom. “Didn’t you read its abilities? Any hints, perhaps?”

She looked at the weapon again, frowning. “Darkflame. Integration. Temporal Reversion. Is integration something you need to have before you can integrate it?”

“That’s… I don’t know what integration is, but that’s not what I was getting at. Temporal Reversion?”

“Okay, you can look into the past. I’m assuming that’s how you knew my mother annoyed the dragon, but what does it have to do with you dying?”

“For someone so smart, you can be amusingly blind in certain areas.”

Raina frowned. “I thought you were supposed to be giving me answers, not playing word games. I’m too tired for this. If all we’re doing is play guess the clever solution, I’m going back to bed.” She started to sit upright.

Jair waved her back down. “It’s not a past-sight power. It reverses the timeline of the entire universe.”

“That’s impossible. No soulspell can affect reality on that scale.”

“And yet it does. I’ve lived through a thousand variations of this day without you. And here you are.”

Just thinking about it threatened to shatter his calm. The urge to hug her, hold her and never let go, rose in the back of his mind, but he flicked it away. The danger wasn’t over yet. Only forestalled for the moment.

Raina made a horrified face. “That sounds awful.”

“It was.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. Just keep yourself alive from now on, and we’ll be good.”

Raina didn’t speak for a time, clearly uncomfortable.

Jair remained seated, watching her and waiting until she was ready to continue.

“So that’s how you knew everything,” Raina realized, her tired mind finally putting the pieces together. “You seemed to know everything about everyone because you learned it all in alternate realities.”

“Basically, yes.”

“And you weren't able to stop Ryenzo in any of them?” She glanced out the window at the bright sky over the dim Institute. “You seemed to deal with her pretty easily.”

Jair laughed, pained and full of countless years of struggle. “Perhaps so. I still don’t fully understand what Maelstrom is capable of.”

She seemed to not know what to say. “And you… you did that for me? Thousands of variations? Of this day?”

“Not just today. Every day since the initiation and ten or so years into the future.”

“Years. And you still came back? How much… how many…?” She sat up and shook her head helplessly. “How much did you have to give up, to come back so far?”

“Everything, and nothing. Whatever I had then, I can reclaim now. And I promised you that I would bring you with me when I became powerful and rich, remember? I couldn’t leave you behind.”

She gave a disbelieving laugh, almost a sob. “You didn’t have to go that far. I can’t imagine anyone going that far.”

“What else was I going to do? Save the world without you?”

“Better that than…” Raina shook her head, clearly overwhelmed.

For a time neither of them spoke.

“So that’s what happened," Raina whispered. "I can’t imagine.”

“So you mentioned.”

She looked up at him, firegold eyes bright with unshed tears, and then hurled herself into his chest with an abrupt lunge. Maelstrom disappeared just in time to get out of the way, and then she was hugging him with a fierceness he’d never before experienced.

Slowly, carefully, Jair wrapped his own arms around her. “I’ve missed you. I have so much I want to show you.”

Raina nodded. “And I want to see it all.”

And that’s where they were sitting when the outer wall collapsed in a ground-shaking crash.

Jair was on his feet before he properly registered what was happening, Maelstrom in his hand as though it had always been there.

Another thud, the ground trembling beneath them, and a rumbling growl that sent sand flying past the window in a sharp gust.

Jair heard screams and the crashing of stone. He knew what was happening even before a huge claw tore the roof off their building and a massive green eye glared down at them.

Ryenzo had run out of patience.

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